Mapping China under Japanese Occupation: Spatial Configurations of State Power during Wartime, 1937–45

Baillargeon, D., & Taylor, J.E. (Eds.). (2022). Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia. London: BloomSerfass, D. (2022). Mapping China under Japanese Occupation: Spatial Configurations of State Power during Wartime, 1937–45. In D. Baillargeon & J.E. Taylor (Eds.). Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia (pp. 119–142). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved March 11, 2022, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350257023.ch-005

L’article en ligne / Bloomsbury collections

“The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) had a tremendous impact on the spatial configuration of state power in China, whether by forcing the transfer by China’s Nationalist government of its capital from Nanjing to Chongqing or in the creation by Japan of a new state apparatus in occupied areas of China. In the meantime, China’s landscape underwent profound changes, from the massive Yellow River flood of 1938 to the transformation of the border regions as a result of the moving of the government administration westwards, followed by the movement of millions of refugees. In the same way, the size and configuration of China’s territory had a significant influence on how the Japanese ‘occupation state’ took shape, and this process affected, in turn, the way in which China’s political landscape was perceived. The occupation forces were gradually organized according to different areas, with each of them sponsoring local pro-Japanese governments. This political configuration of the occupation state was then justified by China’s spatial configuration through a rhetoric that rationalized China’s political disunity as a consequence of its geography.[2]

In keeping with the themes of this volume, this chapter seeks to explore how the Japanese occupation of China resulted in not just actual changes to the landscape of China itself, but also to new ways of administering, imagining and mapping occupied China. Drawing on both Japanese and Chinese archival sources from the occupation period, as well as the literature on ‘mapping’ in wartime Asia, I will show how the Japanese occupation did not lead to a monolithic view of what a wartime and postwar China would look like spatially, but to competing ‘maps’ of 120China that reflected different visions. The chapter makes the case that our understanding of the occupation state can benefit if we take into account the spatiality of state power and the ways in which conflicting political strategies translated into different topographies of the state apparatus. After a preliminary discussion of the occupation state, this chapter focuses on three stages in the remapping of China under Japanese occupation. The first part presents a late 1938 Japanese memorandum promoting the ‘Confederate States of China’, which includes an allegorical sketch of China as a potato plant. The second section addresses the spatial aspect of ‘huandu’ (‘return to/of the capital’) – this being one of the main slogans of the collaborationist regime led by Wang Jingwei. It shows that the location of the capital was not only an issue regarding the fierce competition between Beijing and Nanjing, but also between major cities in each province to become the seat of respective provincial governments under occupation. The third part examines the circumstances in which the collaborationist reorganized national government (RNG) decided to create a brand new province in China – Huaihai Province – as part of a larger plan aimed at redrawing China’s administrative map in order to reduce the size of China’s provinces […] (source : Bloomsbury collections)

David Serfass est maître de conférences à l’Inalco, département des études chinoises

State Building through Political Disunity in Republican China

Numéro spécial de la revue Twentieth-Century China (vol. 47, n°1, janv. 2022), co-édité par Xavier Paulès et David Serfass, intitulé “State Building through Political Disunity in Republican China”
Table des matières : http://hstcconline.org/twentieth-century-china/

→  Le numéro en ligne

Table of Contents

Editorial  by MARGHERITA ZANASI

Special Issue: State Building through Political Disunity in Republican China
Xavier Paulès and David Serfass, Guest Editors

Introduction. Questioning the Teleology of the Central State in Republican China
Xavier Paulès and David Serfass

The Rise of Municipal Government in Early Twentieth-Century China: Local History, International Influence, and National Integration 
Kristin Stapleton

War, Disunity, and State Building in China, 1912–1949 
Emily M. Hill

Migration and State Making: A Beiyang Settlement Scheme along the Amur in 1921
Pierre Fuller

Warlords at Work: Four Crucial Realms and Four Dynamics of State Building in Republican China, 1916–1937
Xavier Paulès

A Critical Dimension of State Building: Taxation in Nationalist China, 1928–1949
Xiaoqun Xu

Health and State Making: The Expansion of State Health Services during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945)
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

Collaboration and State Making in China: Defining the Occupation State, 1937–1945
David Serfass

Review Essay

Subject to the State: Language and Data in Twentieth-Century China 
Rebecca E. Karl

Book Reviews (online at muse.jhu.edu/journal/390)

Jeremy Brown, June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989, reviewed by Brian DeMare.

John A. Crespi, Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn, reviewed by Li Guo.

Peter E. Hamilton, Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization, reviewed by Kent Wan.

Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, reviewed by Di Luo.

Xiaoyuan Liu, To the End of the Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949–1959, reviewed by C. Patterson Giersch.

Yvon Wang, Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China, reviewed by Leon Antonio Rocha.

Peter Zarrow, Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940, reviewed by Matthew Galway.

(source : Project Muse)

David Serfass est Maître de conférences en histoire de la Chine et de l’Asie orientale, à l’Inalco, et membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Etudes chinoises.

Xavier Paulès est Maître de conférences à l’EHESS, et membre du CECMC.

Questioning the Teleology of the Central State in Republican China

Xavier Paulès, David Serfass, “Questioning the Teleology of the Central State in Republican China”, Twentieth-Century China, vol. 47, n°1, janv. 2022, p. 3-10.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/842938

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No doubt the expansion of the reach of the state can be considered one of the prominent features of the twentieth century. Many studies have described this process in Western Europe and beyond. In the case of China, however, there is a marked tendency in the historiography to assume that, except for the Qing dynasty’s lastditch efforts to modernize from 1901–1911 with the New Policies (新政 xinzheng) reforms and a short-lived attempt during the Nanjing Decade (1928–1937), the first half of the twentieth century represented, for the most part, a discontinuation in the process of state building.
It was in order to question this assumption that we organized a conference on “State-Building through Political Disunity in Republican China,” held in Paris at EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in September 2018. The idea was to target the Republican period (1912–1949) as one of critical importance in the process of state building in modern China. (source : Project Muse)

David Serfass est Maître de conférences en histoire de la Chine et de l’Asie orientale, à l’Inalco, et membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Etudes chinoises.

Redevenir des héros

David Serfass, « Redevenir des héros », Le Point, 16 décembre 2021 (chapô : “Pour mieux légitimer sa place de superpuissance dont elle estime avoir été spoliée en 1945, la Chine réinterprète sa guerre de quatorze ans contre le Japon. Une révision à double tranchant qui implique Taïwan.”).

→ L’article en ligne (réservé aux abonnés)

Pour mieux légitimer sa place de superpuissance dont elle estime avoir été spoliée en 1945, la Chine réinterprète sa guerre de quatorze ans contre le Japon. Une révision à double tranchant qui implique Taïwan.

Plus gros succès chinois du box-office en 2020, le film La Brigade des 800, réalisé par Guan Hu, met en scène un épisode fameux de la guerre sino-japonaise (1937-1945). Entre le 26 octobre et le 1er novembre 1937, 423 soldats chinois, qui prétendent être le double pour effrayer l’ennemi, se retranchent dans un entrepôt de Shanghai et opposent une résistance acharnée aux troupes japonaises. Leur courage n’infléchit pas le cours de la guerre, qui voit l’armée impériale prendre Nankin quelques semaines plus tard en s’y livrant aux pires exactions. […] (source : Le Point Hebdo)

David Serfass est Maître de conférences en histoire de la Chine et de l’Asie orientale, à l’Inalco, et membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Etudes chinoises.

La Chine, du traité de Nankin à la proclamation de la République populaire (1842-1949)

Conférence organisée à l’Inalco le 1er février 2020 par l’Institut français de recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est, dans le cadre de la préparation du programme d’histoire du concours de la Banque d’épreuves littéraires (BEL).

Continue reading “La Chine, du traité de Nankin à la proclamation de la République populaire (1842-1949)”

La République de Chine : Histoire générale de la Chine (1912-1949)

Conférence enregistrée à l’Inalco le jeudi 21 novembre 2019 à l’occasion de la parution de l’ouvrage “La République de Chine : Histoire générale de la Chine” (Éditions Les Belles Lettres) : https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livr…

Continue reading “La République de Chine : Histoire générale de la Chine (1912-1949)”